Sic transit gloria mundi.

Sic transit gloria mundi is the latin rendering of All glory is fleeting. As it is, because it must be.

Glory is the realm, and birthright, of men. A quest that stirs in their hearts. Most will never know it, but for those who do...

As a moth is drawn, irresistibly to a flame, so men are drawn towards glory. Its fire consumes them, but in this consummation, they themselves become the glory. Leaving memory, work done, and incomparable satisfaction in its wake.

It can't be described, but I'll give it a go anyway, now that you bring it up.

I've experienced all time, past and future, come together in a single infinite now encompassing it all.

I've experienced space, all space, the universe itself in a single walk, in every step.

I've heard the birds sing and seen the trees sway in the wind. Most people think that's a fairly ordinary thing - but very few actually hear or see anything at all. How glorious it all is.

I've experienced myself, my whole self as one small step along an infinite path, stretching back before my birth and ever onwards beyond death. And on this pathway, every conceivable 'back' and 'forth' came together, as if completing one circle encompassing all.

And the strangest, most wonderful thing: In experiencing this I found, that I had been immersed in this glory my entire life - and that I would continue to be so forever, whatever I may come to be, or not to be. In whatever I may have been or not been, I've been in the midst of this glory and I'll be in it forever onwards - even if 'I' cease to be 'I'. Cause it's got nothing to do with me.

Hehe That would have been beautiful, even without my knowing it was all absolutely true. My wife loved it, too, and recognized every description. While it is a fact that no language can do the reality justice, your depiction of it is about as good as it gets. Yes. That's glory!

This is my greatest tale of glory, it might not be what you think of glorious, but for me it may have been my finest hour yet.

So I was skating around with my usual crew, and we noticed a lot of Pall Mall cigarette packs at OUR park. We smoke Lucky Strikes, our rival crew smokes Pall Malls so we knew what was up. We waited for them to come back to our spot. So a couple nights later we came to the park with our beers, our weed and our girls, and the rival crew, the Alta Boys, named for the street they are centered on, come through with all their girls too. So we challenged them to a game of S.K.A.T.E., which is basically you attempting to do the same trick as your opponent then making it better, for example if the opponent does a kickflip off of a bench, I have to do a kickflip into a manual to beat him. Everytime you fuck up you get an extra letter until you spell skate and you lose.

So we started playing, and we eventually got to the point where we were both at SKAT, and it was my turn to go. The rival did a sick nose manual down this flat snake bench sculpture thing, and did a nollie over the head of the snake. I thought we were screwed. So I get up, all the girls were cheering me on, even some of the Alta girls which really pissed them off haha. I'm thinking about what to do to top him, so I did a tic tac manual (thats what we call it when you manual while going left-right-left-right) down half the snake, switched it to a nose manual then grinded a bit on the head of the snake and even though the landing was kinda sketched the vote from the girls was unanimous, we definitely won! We bet on this game and we won a little bit of cash, one of their girls stayed with us instead and they were never seen at that particular park again.

It was glorious, then we all went down to the Vegas Strip and partied the rest of the night.

I know its kind of a long story but when you asked if I have any tales of glory that popped straight into my head.

When I was younger, around the age of 4-5, I was at some fast food restaurant which had one of those big play areas for kids. They had a series of those big plastic tubes, you know the ones that are like caves when you're a toddler.

Well anyway, I had been exploring around with my little brother (who at the time was only around a year old) in this plastic world. We were both crawling through the same plastic tunnel to get to the slide, but when I got to the slide I noticed that he wasn't behind me anymore. I turned around and went back down the tube, turning a corner to see my brother being grabbed at by some other little punk. The kid was apparently wanting to go down the slide first, and was trying to hold my brother back so he could go first. Without hesitation, I said "HEY you can't do that! That's MY brother!" and proceeded to punch him square in the nose. Well the little bastard started crying like the little wimp he was. I made sure my brother was OK and we both went down the slide into the ball pit.

Years later my grandmother told me this story and said at the time she witnessed it, she couldn't stop laughing.